What I’m Reading – Roy Foster – Vivid Faces

This is the first in a series of how many I eventually do. Rather than writing a review I will ask people to tell me what they are reading and what they like about the book. Kicking it off is Michael McCaughan telling me about Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces, the Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890 – 1923 Penguin Books

Is a really interesting account about some of the main and not so main people behind the Rising and subsequent insurrection and war of independence and civil war era.

Foster takes these characters and looks at not just what their cv’s were like, ie cultural nationalist or served in the British armay and then trained the irish volunteers. he looks at it from a generational perspective, almost as a generation who rejected their parents values, went out and were influenced by feminism, vegetarianism, the most remarkable things we don’t associate with that generation because we have it down to a narrow nationalist narrative.

I learned today that there were two vegetarian restaurants in Dublin at the time where a lot of them used to hang out in. It a cultural history through people’s stories that are not just tales of the great men who participated